Catholics for Choice Condemns House Minority Leader Pelosi for Remarks on Abortion

For Immediate Release

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Catholics for Choice issued a letter today to US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi condemning her remarks discarding the importance of prochoice principles to the Democratic Party.

Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, issued the following statement on behalf of the organization:

“As Catholics, we are dismayed by Minority Leader Pelosi’s out of touch and self-serving statements that throw women and their right to make their own moral decisions under the bus.

Let’s be clear—unity in diversity of thought is an important value in America and what any political party should seek to nurture. However, a party that claims the mantle on social justice and civil liberties cannot turn its back on women’s moral autonomy and the right to make conscience-based decisions. Women’s rights are human rights and they cannot be traded away based on short-sighted political calculations. Minority Leader Pelosi’s claim that ‘abortion is a fading issue’ is also downright irresponsible when women’s access to abortion services is under attack across America by restrictive legislative proposals and efforts to limit providers, especially for the poorest women.

Minority Leader Pelosi is flat out wrong in assuming that the majority of Catholics are against the Democratic Party’s prochoice stance and about the Catholic vote in the last national election. The majority of Catholics believe that the primacy of conscience in our faith compels us to support the freedom of women of all races, creeds and incomes to make their own conscience-based decisions about their bodies. More than 60 percent of Catholics believe abortion should be legal; six in ten Catholic voters say that abortion can be a moral choice; and Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as women of other faiths or no faith.

At a time when President Trump is installing an antichoice and anti-women regime as political payback to religious extremists, it is sad to see Minority Leader Pelosi wanting to take the Democratic Party back to its pre-Civil Rights past.”

Catholics for Choice shapes and advances sexual and reproductive ethics that are based on justice, reflect a commitment to women's well-being and respect and affirm the capacity of women and men to make moral decisions about their lives.